


Taylor's Harem

by HadenBreslin



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: BDSM, Bondage, F/F, F/M, Forced Feminization, G!P made from bugs, I'm just using every kink trope I find hot, Multi, Non-Consensual, Probably a lot of forced, Rape/Non-con Elements, S&M, Underage - Freeform, What Have I Done, i have no idea what i am doing, i'll add tags as i go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 13:05:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19251784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HadenBreslin/pseuds/HadenBreslin
Summary: Taylor is fed up with the trio and their continued abuse, and so she decides "Fuck It." And gives into her darker impulses. Of course it doesn't help that her shard is hastening her spiral into the dark, but she's not complaining.Fair warning, Taylor is probably very OOC.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story came about because I have weird kinks and I wanted those kinks in a story with Taylor.

1.1

  
Class ended in five minutes and all I could think was, _an hour is too long for lunch ._

Since the start of the semester, I had been looking forward to the part of Mr. Gladly’s World Issues class where we’d start discussing capes. Now that it had finally arrived, I couldn’t focus. I fidgeted, my pen moving from hand to hand, tapping, or absently drawing some figure in the corner of the page to join the other doodles. My eyes were restless too, darting from the clock above the door to Mr. Gladly and back to the clock. I wasn’t picking up enough of his lesson to follow along.

Twenty minutes to twelve; five minutes left before class ended.  
He was animated, clearly excited about what he was talking about, and for once, the class was listening. He was the sort of teacher who tried to be friends with his students, the sort who went by “Mr. G” instead of Mr. Gladly. He liked to end class a little earlier than usual and chat with the popular kids, gave lots of group work so others could hang out with their friends in class, and had ‘fun’ assignments like mock trials.

He struck me as one of the ‘popular’ kids who had become a teacher. He probably thought he was everyone’s favorite. I wondered how he’d react if he heard my opinion on the subject. Would it shatter his self image or would he shrug it off as an anomaly from the gloomy girl that never spoke up in class?

I glanced over my shoulder. Madison Clements sat two rows to my left and two seats back. She saw me looking and smirked, her eyes narrowing, I dropped my eyes back to my notebook and clenched my fist, trying to ignore the snakes coiling in my stomach.

“Let me wrap up here,” Mr. Gladly said, “Sorry, guys, but there _is_ homework for the weekend. Think about capes and how they’ve impacted the world around you. Make a list if you want, but it’s not mandatory. On Monday we’ll break up into groups of four and see what group has the best list. I’ll buy the winning group treats from the vending machine.”

There were a series of cheers, followed by the classroom devolving into noisy chaos. The room was filled with sounds of binders snapping shut, textbooks and notebooks being slammed closed, chairs screeching on cheap tile and the dull roar of emerging conversation. A bunch of the more social members of the class gathered around Mr. Gladly to chat.

Me? I just put my notebook away and kept quiet. I’d written down almost nothing in the way of notes; there were collections of characters spreading across the page and small bug doodles in the margins which I used to count down the minutes to lunch as if I was keeping track of the timer on a bomb.

Madison was talking with her friends. She was popular, but not gorgeous in the way the stereotypical popular girls on TV were. She was ‘adorable’, instead. Petite. She played up the image with sky blue pins in her shoulder length brown hair and a cutesy attitude. Madison wore a strapless top and denim skirt, which seemed absolutely moronic to me given the fact that it was still early enough in the spring that we could see our breath in the mornings.

I wasn’t exactly in a position to criticize her. Boys liked her and she had friends, while the same was hardly true for me. The only feminine feature I had going for me was my dark curly hair, which I had changed into an undercut with a fade-because new personality- and it subsequently emphasized my androgynous traits. The clothes I used to wear didn’t show skin and they still don’t but now they were more form fitting and more flattering, though I still subscribed to the same color as before, black or gray.  
Guys liked her, I think, because she was appealing without being intimidating.  
If they only knew.

The bell rang with a lilting ding-dong, and I was the first one out the door. I didn’t run, but I moved at a decent clip as I headed up the stairwell to the third floor and made my way to the girl’s washroom.

There were a half dozen girls there already, which meant I had to wait for a stall to open up. I silently watched the door of the bathroom, if I still felt normal things I’d probably be feeling my heart drop every time someone entered the room, but I didn’t so I wasn't.

When there was a free stall, I let myself in and locked the door. I sat down on the lid of the toilet and dropped my face into my hands, exhaling slowly. It wasn’t quite a sigh of relief. Relief implied you felt better. I wouldn’t feel better until I got home.

It took maybe five minutes before the noise of others in the washroom stopped. A peek below the partitions showed that there was nobody else in the other stalls. I got my brown bag lunch to begin eating. Lunch on the toilet was routine now. Every school day, I would finish off my brown bag lunch, then I’d read a book or experiment until lunch hour was over. The only reading book I had was called ‘The Amateur’s Guide to Insects in Brockton Bay', a book about the variety of insect species found in Brockton Bay.  
I was thinking I would read four pages of the book before I started to work on Mr. Gladly's assignment but whatever my plan, I didn’t even have a chance to finish my pita wrap.

The door of the bathroom banged open. I froze. I didn’t want to rustle the bag and clue anyone into what I was doing, so I kept still and listened. I couldn’t make out the voices. The noise of the conversation was obscured by giggling and the sound of water from the sinks. There was a knock on the door. I ignored it, but the person on the other side just repeated the knock.

“Occupied,” I called out, knowing I messed up the minute the word left my mouth.

“Oh my god, it’s Taylor!” one of the girls on the outside exclaimed with glee, then in response to something another girl whispered, I barely heard her add, “Yeah, do it!”

I stood up abruptly, letting the brown bag with the last mouthful of my lunch fall to the tiled floor. Rushing for the door, I popped the lock open and pushed. The door budged a little but immediately slammed back again.  
There were noises from the stalls on either side of me, then a sound above me. I looked up to see what it was, only to get splashed in the face. My eyes started burning, and I was momentarily blinded by the stinging fluid in my eyes and the staining of my glasses. I could taste it as it ran down to my nose and mouth. Cranberry juice.

They didn’t stop there. I managed to pull my glasses off just in time to see Madison and Sophia leaning over the top of the stall, each of them with plastic bottles at the ready. I bent over with my hands shielding my head just before they emptied the contents over me.

It ran down the back of my neck and fizzed as it ran through my hair. I pushed against the door again, but the girl on the other side was braced against it with her body.

If the girls pouring juice and soda on me were Madison and Sophia, that meant the girl on the other side of the door was Emma, leader of the trio. Feeling a flare of anger at the realization, I shoved on the door, the full weight of my body slamming against it. I managed to get the door and the body against it to move but than my boots lost traction on the juice-slick floor. I fell to my knees in the pooling juice.

Empty plastic bottles with labels for grape and cranberry juice fell to the ground around me. A bottle of orange soda bounced off my shoulder to splash into the puddle before rolling under the partition and into the next stall. The smell of the fruity drinks and sodas was sickly sweet.

The door swung open, and I glared up at the three girls. Madison, Sophia and Emma. Where Madison was cute, a late bloomer, Sophia and Emma were the types of girls that fit the ‘prom queen’ image. Sophia was dark skinned, with a slender, athletic build she’d developed as a runner on the school track team. Red-headed Emma, by contrast, had all the curves the guys wanted. She was good looking enough to get occasional jobs as a amateur model for the catalogs that the local department stores and malls put out. The three of them were laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world, but the sounds of their amusement barely registered with me. My attention was on the faint roar of blood pumping in my ears and an urgent, ominous crackling sound that wouldn’t get any quieter or less persistent if I covered my ears with my hands.

 _ **Show them**_.

I shook my head.

_**Show them their superior!** _

I could feel dribbles running down my neck and back, still chilled from the refrigerated vending machines.

I didn’t trust myself to say something that wouldn’t give them a reason to escalate so I kept silent.

Carefully, I climbed to my feet and turned my back on them to get my backpack off the top of the toilet. Seeing it gave me smirk. It was a dark black, it was still dark black and while there were droplets of liquid speckled over it, I could tell it was still dry. Pulling the straps around my shoulders, I turned around. The girls weren’t there. I heard the bathroom door bang shut, cutting off the sounds of their glee, leaving me alone in the bathroom.

I approached the sink and stared at myself in the scratched, stained mirror that was bolted above it. I had inherited a thin lipped, wide, expressive mouth from my mother, but my large eyes and my gawky figure made me look a lot more like my dad. My dark hair was soaked enough that it clung to my scalp.

I was wearing a black hooded sweater, and despite the fact that my naked skin was now coated in the drying juice my top was still dry. I was happy the silk stayed dry, but it staying dry meant nothing when I was soaked.

My glasses were beaded with the multicolored droplets of juice and soda. A drip ran down my nose and fell from the tip to land in the sink.

 _Deep breaths, Taylor,_ I told myself.

I felt a drop of liquid slide down my hair and fall into the gap between the collar and my neck.

An inarticulate scream of fury and frustration escaped my lips, and I kicked the plastic bucket that sat just beneath the sink, sending it and the toilet brush inside flying into the wall. When that wasn’t enough, I pulled off my backpack and used a two-handed grip to hurl it. I wasn’t using my locker anymore: certain individuals had vandalized and broken into it on four different occasions. But my bag was light, loaded down with only the insect book, my notebooks and my pencil case. It crunched inaudibly on impact with the wall.

“What the fuck!?” I screamed to nobody in particular, my voice echoing in the bathroom.  
“The hell am I supposed to do!?” no, that was wrong I knew what I was suppose to do, I knew what I wanted to do. But I couldn’t do any of it, I couldn’t let go of my humanity like that.

I wanted to hit something, break something. To retaliate against the unfairness of the world. I struck the mirror, the glass cracked and fractured in a spider web pattern. I growled, flexing my fingers and wiping the glass dust from my knuckles.

_**Show them!** _

I’d been enduring this from the very first day of high school, a year and a half ago. The bathroom had been the closest thing I could find to refuge. A place where I was off their radar. Now I didn’t even have that.

I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do for my afternoon classes. Our midterm project for art was due, and I couldn’t go to class like this. The liquid was drying and becoming tacky and uncomfortable on my skin, and even if I could stand to go out like this, Sophia would be there, and I could just imagine how she’d escalate if I showed up looking like I hadn’t just had soda and juice poured all over me.

_**Make them pay!** _

I clenched my eyes shut, ignoring the screaming voice at the back of my thoughts.  
And besides, I’d just thrown my bag against the wall and I doubted my project was still in one piece.

The buzzing at the edge of my consciousness was getting worse. My hands shook as I bent over and gripped the edge of the sink, let out a long, slow breath, and let my defenses drop. For six months, I’d held back. Right now? I didn’t care anymore.

_**Make them understand!** _

I shut my eyes and felt the buzzing crystallize into concrete information. As numerous as stars in the night sky, tiny knots of intricate data filled the area around me. I could focus on each one in turn, pick out details or I could focus on all of them, all at once. The clusters of data had been reflexively drifting towards me since I woke up this morning.

_**Yes! Let go!** _

They responded to my subconscious thoughts and emotions, as much of a reflection of my frustration, my anger, my hatred for those three girls as my pounding heart and trembling hands were. I could make them stop or direct them to move almost without thinking about it, the same way I could raise an arm or twitch a finger.  
Show them!

I opened my eyes. I could feel adrenaline thrumming through my body, blood coursing in my veins. I shivered in response to the chilled soft drinks and juices the trio had poured over me, with anticipation and joy.  
On every surface of the bathroom were insects; Flies, ants, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, earwigs, termites, beetles, wasps and bees. And soon joining them were other small animals, rats, squirrels, toads, snakes, pigeons, possums, rabbits, raccoons, to name a few.

With every passing second, more streamed in through the open window and the various openings in the bathroom, moving with surprising speed. Some of the insects crawled in through a gap where the sink drain entered the wall while other critters emerged from the triangular hole in the ceiling where a section of foam tile had broken off, or from the opened window with peeling paint and cigarette butts squished out in the recesses.

_**Show them your strength!** _

They gathered around me and spread out over every available surface; primitive bundles of signals and responses, waiting for further instruction.

My practice sessions, conducted away from prying eyes, told me I could direct a single animal to move an antennae, tail or paw, or command the gathered horde to move in formation. With one thought, I could single out a particular group, maturity or species from this jumble and direct them as I wished. An army of soldiers under my complete control.

It would be so easy, so easy to just go Carrie on the school. To give the trio their just desserts and make them regret what they had put me through: the vicious e-mails, the trash they’d upended over my desk, the flute –my mother’s flute– they’d stolen from my locker. It wasn’t just them either. Other girls and a small handful of boys had joined in, ‘accidentally’ skipping over me when passing out assignment handouts, adding their own voices to the taunts and the flood of nasty emails, to get the favor and attention of three of the prettier and more popular girls in our grade.

I was all too aware that I’d get caught and arrested if I attacked my fellow students. There were three teams of superheroes and any number of solo heroes in the city. I didn’t really care. Even the thought of my father seeing the aftermath on the news, his disappointment in me, his shame? Didn’t outweigh the anger and frustration.

_**Make them beg!** _

Except it would be too easy, too quick. They deserved more than just being eaten alive by my horde. They had to feel the same hopelessness I felt for so long.

_**Make them understand!** _

They needed to understand their place was beneath me. That I was God, and all they were are bugs to be controlled at my pleasure.

  _Not yet._

 ** _But_**.

 _Soon_.

With a sigh, I sent an instruction to the gathered horde. _Disperse_. The word wasn’t as important as the idea behind it. They began to exit the room, disappearing into the cracks in the tile and through the open window. I walked over to the door and stood with my back to it so nobody could stumble onto the scene before the animals were all gone.

However much I wanted to, I couldn’t indulge in the darker impulses yet. I needed to set things up. I couldn’t just rush this, no, I need to take my time, build things up. Nodding I picked up my backpack, I would wait, set things up so that all was in my favor then I'd show them.

**_Show them all!_ **

I would show them all.

I straightened my spine, no more slouching, no more cowering. I made my way out of the school, ignoring the stares and giggles from everyone I walked past, and caught the first bus that headed in the general direction of home. The spider silk did an admirable job of keeping me warm even in the early spring weather, though the sticky residue covering my skin was not pleasant.

 _Soon_.

I was going to be a superhero. That was the goal I used to calm myself down at moments like these. It was what I used to make myself get out of bed on a school day. It was a crazy dream that made things tolerable. It was something to look forward to, something to work towards. It made it possible to keep from dwelling on the fact that Emma Barnes, leader of the trio, had once been my best friend.


	2. 1.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm looking for a beta, someone to look through the chapters before I post to correct mistakes and to help with dialog, because I suck at that. 
> 
> Also, not all concepts are originally mine, I'm using concepts I read about, really liked and thought would make for a good story.

1.2

  
My thoughts were on Emma on the bus ride home. For an outside observer, I think it’s easy to trivialize the importance of a ‘best friend’, but when you’re a kid, there’s nobody more important. Emma had been my ‘BFF’ from grade one all the way through middle school. It hadn’t been enough for us to spend our time together at school, so we had alternated staying at each others houses every weekend. I remember my mother saying that we were so close we were practically sisters.

A friendship that deep is intimate. Not in a sexual way, but just in terms of a no-holds-barred sharing of every vulnerability and weakness.

So when I got back from science camp just a week before our first year at high school started, to find that she wasn’t talking to me? That she was calling Sophia her best friend? Discovering that she was now using every one of those secrets and vulnerabilities I had shared with her to wound me in the most vicious ways she could think of? It was crushing. There’s just no better way to say it.

Unwilling to dwell on it any longer, I turned my attention to my backpack, setting it on the seat beside me and sorting through the contents. Grape juice had glanced off it, and I'm immensely glad I'd thought of changing all of my clothing and my backpack to ones made of spider silk. I'd had it weaved together six months ago, after my old one had been taken from my locker.

My notebooks, one novel I’d shoved into my bag were dry and clean. I noted the destruction of my art project – the box I’d put it in was collapsed on the one side. That bit was my fault.

I found the notebook with the white and black speckled hardcover. That notebook was my notes and journal for my hero career. The testing and training I’d done with my powers, pages of crossed out name ideas, even the measurements I was using for my costume in progress.

After Emma, Madison and Sophia had stolen my last backpack and stuffed it in a wastebasket, I had realized how big a danger it was to have everything written down like that. I had copied everything over into a new notebook in a complex cipher and wrote it bottom to top.

The bus stopped a block away from my house, and I got off, walking home. I felt better as I got closer to my house. It felt worlds better to know I could drop my guard, stop watching my back and that I could take a break from wondering when the next incident would happen. I let myself into the house and headed straight for the shower, removing my backpack and taking off my shoes along the way.

I undressed and stood under the stream, sighing as the water helped get the worst of the juice off my skin and out of my hair. I pondered.

I don’t know who said it, but at one point I had come across this notion about taking a negative and turning it into a positive. I didn’t want to though, I was tired. Tired of being alone, tired off being bullied by the trio and their friends and then being dismissed by the school staff, I was tired of being weak and hiding. I was strong, before the Locker and especially afterwards.

It was time I acted like it.

Once upon a time I would have buried this, would have swept it under the covers and forgotten about it. I would be angry, but never do anything about it. I was humiliated, frustrated, pissed, and now I always had a weapon available – my power. It was like having a loaded gun in your hand at all times.

Even if I only had control of animals, there are enough animals in one city block to be a considerable threat.

I could draw from five.

I had a loaded gun in my hand, but I didn’t use it, I made myself weak, stunted myself, made myself a victim because I had this misguided idea I could be better than them. It was a lie I told myself, because the truth was there was nothing I could do that would make a difference.

Short of outing myself, being a superhero wouldn’t make the trio back off, because they wouldn’t know, it would just make me feel better, make me feel superior to them but how long would that last? How long before they beat and humiliate the good feeling out of me?

A day? A week?

Being a superhero was my escape, but why should I put myself at risk fighting Lung, Hookwolf, Oni Lee and the rest of them?

What point was being a superhero if I couldn’t shout it from the rooftops and make the trio know I was truly better than them?

I was a Master-with what I am pretty sure are Biotinker and Thinker subratings-, a high level one if my growing range, my ability to see, hear and feel through my horde and total control of all those animals in my range were any indication.

Right now I had control of five blocks worth of animals, and it was growing with each use of my power, if I wanted to I could have those five blocks under my control in a month, maybe less.

Even if I didn’t have a high Brute rating, I could break down my horde into pure mass and use it to heal or augment myself, and while I couldn’t make myself a Alexandria package, the very first thing I'd done when I realized my ability to mutate my horde also referred to me was to increase the density of my bones, making them more durable, I also included subdermal honeycomb structures that would act as a second, harder, skin.

And if that wasn’t enough I could create an insect, amphibian, reptilian or mammal that could fill the role of tank.

And with my armor I was stab proof, water and fireproof, and even if it wasn’t out right bulletproof, with twenty layers of silk with hardened chitin armor plating over all my vital areas I was pretty damn close.

In armor I was going to be difficult to kill, but I still needed to be careful. No rushing into danger, no undo risks.

I still wanted to be a cape, but I no longer cared if I was a villain or a hero. I was going to be free, damn the consequences.

_**Humanity is for pussies anyway.** _

I cranked the shower to off, then toweled dry, thinking. I wrapped the towel around me, I put my clothes into the laundry hamper and made a quick stop in my room to pull on a pair of fitted black chinos, black combat boots and a long sleeved v-neck sweater before grabbing my backpack and heading out the backdoor and hoping over the back fence to the house behind our backyard.

My house is old, the house behind ours is older. Six months ago the windows had been busted in, the roof had holes, the wood flooring was rotted through and the interior of the house was covered in thick layers of dust and garbage. Now, after a hard weekend of scrubbing, dusting and nailing. The busted windows were covered by plywood, the roof was patched, the floor was down to it's cement base and though I hadn’t gotten to the second floor and attic yet, the basement and first floor were clean of dust and garbage.

I tapped my finger against the raised symbol of a butterfly that was pressed into the doorframe, a soft click sounded and the door sprang open, I slipped in through the gape and kicked the door closed behind me. The living was filled with an old TV I'd gotten from the junkyard, with three couches, two ottomans, a coffee table and a few dozen bookshelves I'd gotten for free from a furniture store going out of business.

I went into the kitchen then down into the basement, tapping the switch nestled into the wall as I went down the steps. The room hummed as the fireflies came to life, giving illumination to my laboratory.

The basement was larger than the living room and broken into four segments, along the north wall were my work stations, for armor and weapons. The south segment of the lab was a large terrarium dug into the wall by the ants and beetles, housing my smaller swarm, my bees, wasps, spiders and worms.

And the east segment had small cubbies mounted onto the wall with stairways connecting them together where some of the smaller and furrier of my horde made their homes. While the west segment had a small futon, a beanbag chair and two fifty gallon water tanks on either side of the futon-that were filled with some coral, miniature jelly fish, star fish and some plankton-casting a soft green light over the small area.

  
“Hey Oscar.” I said as I walked to the living area of the lab, leaning down to scratch behind the ears of the old German Shepard, he gave a rumbling woof, licked my cheek then went right back to his nap. I rolled my eyes at him, though I couldn’t fault him his laziness.

In the middle of the room sat three unique pieces of equipment, the first was a wing chun, the second was a standing punching bag, both I had gotten for cheap at a dojo's going out of sale buyout two months ago. And third was a perfectly matched wood model of myself where several hundred modified black widows weaved another layer of silk onto my costume.

Six months ago, after I’d recovered from the manifestation of my powers, I had started to prepare for the goal I had set for myself. It had involved an exercise routine, training my power, research, and preparing my costume. Costumes were harder than one might think.

While members of official teams surely had sources for that stuff, the rest of us were left to either buy costumes, put them together piecemeal with stuff bought from stores or make them from scratch. Each option had its problems. If you bought a costume online, you ran the risk of being traced, which could blow your secret identity before you’d even put a costume on.

You could put a costume together with stuff bought from stores, but very few people could do that and look good. The final option, putting a costume together yourself, was just a hell of a lot of work and you could run into the issues of the prior two options – being traced or winding up with a lame costume – depending on where you got your materials and how you went about it.

In the second week after I’d figured out my powers, when I still wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, I remembered a long ago segment on the discovery channel about a suit that was made to withstand attacks by bears. That segment talked about how the suit was made of synthetic spider silk, which had inspired this particular project. Why go synthetic when you can produce with the real thing?

Okay, so it had been harder than that. Not just any spider worked, and the black widow spiders themselves were hard to find. They weren’t typically found in the northeastern states, where it was generally colder, but I was fortunate that that key element that made Brockton Bay a tourist destination and a hotspot for capes also made it a place where black widow spiders could live, if not thrive.

Namely, it was warm.

Thanks to the surrounding geography and the ocean bordering us on the east, Brockton Bay had some of the mildest winters you could find in the Northeastern States, and some of the most comfortably warm summers. Both the black widows and the people running around in skintight costumes were thankful for that.

With my power, I had ensured that the spiders could multiply and modified them so that the next generation would be bigger and had more silk than the first. I had fattened them on prey I directed straight to them.  
I had flipped that mental switch that told them to breed and lay eggs as if it was summer, fed more prey to the hundreds of young that had resulted and had earned countless costume spinners for my trouble.

The biggest issue had been that black widows are territorial, so I had to breed that out with the second generation to ensure they didn’t kill each other when I wasn’t around to control them.

And now I had a badass costume.

The costume came in six pieces. The helmet which looked like a bug head was a silk ski mask with chitin scale plating for the top, back and sides of my head, the face had a pair of yellow tinted googles sown into the silk and a detachable square mouth guard with mandibles that protected my jaw and connected to the side of my face in case I needed to eat or throw up.

The torso piece was a chitin splint plated silk cuiress with pauldrons attached. The third piece of my armor was a turtleneck that would go under my cuirass, weaved into the elbows were elbow guards and the sleeves came with already attached gloves.

The fourth piece of my costume were two silk and chitin vambraces that reached from my elbow to come to a stop in a gentle V shape at my knuckles. Next came a pair of fitted and armored silk combat pants with chitin plate cuisse, knee-guards and greaves weaved into the pants for added protection for my legs. And finally came my boots, these were just a normal pair of black military boots.

The fabric was a yellow-white. The armored sections had been made out of finely arranged and layered shells and exoskeletons I’d cannibalized from the local insect population and then reinforced with dragline silk. In the end, the armored parts had wound up dark gray. I was okay with that. When the entire thing was done, I planned to dye the fabric and paint the armor.

The reason I was so pleased with my costume was the fact that it was flexible, durable, and incredibly lightweight, considering the amount of armor I had put on it.

At one point I had screwed up the dimensions of one of the legs, and when I tried to cut it off to start fresh, I had found I couldn’t cut it with an x-acto knife. I had needed to use wire cutters, and even that had been a chore. As far as I figured, it was everything a superhero wanted for a costume.

The plan was to finish my costume over the course of the month, then as the school year ended and the summer began, I would take the leap into the world of superheroics.  
But the plan had changed. I moved over to the work station with my weapons. On the table were two stun guns, four combat knives, and two collapsible batons, but what made these weapons so different was all of them were very much natural, made from coral and three times more dangerous as the standard issue.

Unlike the silk idea this was entirely my brain child, after realizing I could control animals I'd spent a weekend traversing the Brockton Bay Zoo and Aquarium to figure out what animals I could and could not control, my power extended to invertebrates and vertebrates, notable exception being humans.

And with my control of animals I found that I could modify them as well so I had looked up other animals that I could modify to make weapons from. The first had been an electric eel to see how I could incorporate it's defense method for a non-lethal close combat weapon, the next had been coral for it's usability as a blunt force weapon.  
And a weekend job at the local zoo had given me the access to both creatures to experiment. And it only took me a dozen tries to get the right combinations for the stun guns.

When I had been standing in the shower, trying to clean myself up, my thoughts had turned to my notebook. I had realized I was procrastinating. I was constantly planning, preparing, considering all of the possibilities. But there would always be more preparations, more stuff to study or test. The almost destruction of my notebook had been the burning of a bridge.

It was time to do it. I picked up the batons and flicked my wrists gently, smiling at the almost inaudible click as they extended. I’d go out next week – no.

No more delays. This weekend, I would be ready.

_**Show them our strength!** _

 


	3. 1.3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay. I'm juggling two stories at once.

1.3

My training schedule consisted of running every morning and free running every night, three thirty minute practice sets on both the wing chun and the punching bag. In the process of running, I had picked up good knowledge of the east side of the city. Growing up in Brockton Bay, my parents had told me stuff like “stick to the Boardwalk”.

Even on my runs, I had scrupulously stayed on the Boardwalk and avoided the bad part of town. Now it was Sunday night and I was in costume and breaking the rules.

I had dyed and painted the costume on Friday, finished the two gun shoulder holster, hip holsters for both batons and knives and a utility belt stocked with spider silk ties, epi-pens and a basic medkit on Saturday and finished the most necessary details over the course of my Sunday afternoon before heading out for the evening. While also getting started on a second suit, and since my spiders already knew what to do I had little doubt this second one would be easy for them.

The costume was complete, with the full extent of armor paneling and twenty layers of silk I desired, protecting my face, chest, spine, stomach and major joints. The mask's yellow lenses were the only color on the black costume.

It was just after midnight, and I was crossing the line between one of the nicest parts of town and the part of town where the crack whores and gangsters lived. The distance between the two was thinner than one might think.

The Boardwalk was where the tourists came. Running north-to-south along the beach, there were shops that sold dresses for over a thousand dollars, cafes with ludicrously expensive coffees and stretches of wooden walkways and beaches where tourists could get a great view of the ocean.

From pretty much any point on the Docks, you could see one of Brockton Bay’s landmarks, the Protectorate Headquarters. Besides being a marvel of architectural design with its arches and towers, the PHQ was a floating base of operations that a squadron of local superheroes called home, outfitted with a forcefield bubble and a missile defense system.

There had never been occasion for either to be used, but I had to admit, it made you feel safer.

If you headed west from the Boardwalk, away from the water, you found yourself in the area the locals just called the ‘Docks’. When the import/export business in Brockton Bay had dried up, there had been a whole lot of people who were suddenly out of work.

The richest and most resourceful people in town had managed to make more money, turning the city’s resources towards tech and banking, but all of the people who had been employed on the ships and in the warehouses had few options left to them.

They faced leaving Brockton Bay, sticking around while scraping up what little work they could or turning to more illicit activity.

This all contributed to the boom in the local supervillain population. The potential for big money coupled with the number of eager-to-please mooks and henchmen made it the city to be for the villains in the late 90s.

It took a few years for the hero presence to establish and organize themselves, but they did, and there was something of an equilibrium now.

As far as cape population went, Brockton Bay wasn’t in the top 5 cities in the U.S., but it was probably in the top ten.

Just moving from one block to the next, you could see the change in the area. As I made my way into the Docks, I could see the quality of my surroundings decline steeply. There were enough warehouses and apartments in the area for even the most destitute to find shelter, so the only people on the streets were unconscious drunks, whores and gang members. I steered clear of any and all people I saw and ventured further into the area.

  
As I walked, I was using my powers to draw a swarm together while using them as a sort of radar, moving them over the nearby rooftops and through the interior of buildings. Anyone paying attention to the local animal population might think something was up, but there weren’t many lights on.

I doubted most of the buildings here even had power.

The lack of lights in the area was what made me stop and draw myself against the side of a building when I saw a spot of orange in the dark street ahead. The orange was the flame of a lighter, and I was able to make out several faces around it.

They were Asian, some wearing hoodies, others wearing headbands or long sleeved shirts, but all wore the same colors. Red and green.

  
I knew who these guys were. They were members from the local gang that left the tags ‘Azn Bad Boys’, ABB for short, all over the East end of the city. More than a few went to my school. As far as the criminal element in Brockton Bay went, they weren’t small potatoes.

While the typical gang members were just Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese and Chinese forcibly recruited from Brockton Bay’s high schools and lower class neighborhoods, the gang was led by a couple of people with powers.

Gangs didn’t tend to be that racially inclusive as far as who joined, so it said something that their leader had the ability to draw in members from so many different nationalities and keep them in line.

The street was unlit, so my ability to see was dependent on the moon and the few indoor lights that were still on and shining out onto the sidewalks. I started actively looking for their boss. There were more gang members coming out of a two-story building, and they were gathering in the street.

They didn’t have the atmosphere of people who were just hanging out, either. They were expressionless or scowling, and they weren’t talking.

I spotted their boss as the gang pulled away from the door of the building to give him room. I only knew about this guy from what I had heard on the news and read online, but I recognized him immediately. He was a big guy, but not so big that he would send people running when he walked down the street, like some people with powers were.

He was a little over six feet, though, which put him head and shoulders above most of the gang members. He had an ornate metal mask over his face, and wasn’t wearing a shirt, despite the chill. Sprawling tattoos covered his body from the neck down, all depicting dragons from Eastern mythology.

He went by ‘Lung’, had successfully gone toe to toe with whole teams of heroes and had managed to keep himself out of jail, as evidenced by his presence here. The information online and in the papers had told me this: Lung could gradually transform.

Maybe it was based on adrenaline, his emotional state, or something, but whatever it was, it made his powers more potent the longer he was in a fight. He healed at a superhuman rate, got stronger, got tougher, got bigger, and he grew armor plating complete with blades at each fingertip.

Rumor had it that he even grew wings if he fought long enough. If that wasn’t enough, he was a pyrokinetic, which meant he could create flame out of thin air, shape it, intensify it, and so on. That power apparently got stronger as he transformed, too.

As far as I knew, there wasn’t an upper limit to how strong he could get. He only started returning to normal when there was nobody left to fight.

I'd need to end a fight with him as quickly as I could.

Lung wasn’t the only one with powers in the ABB. He had a flunky, a sociopath called Oni Lee, who could teleport and create doubles of himself. Oni Lee had a distinctive look, and I didn’t see him in the crowd. If there was anyone else with powers that I needed to watch out for, I hadn’t seen or heard anything about them in my research.

  
Lung began talking in a deep, commanding voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like he was giving instructions. As I watched, one of the gang members drew a butterfly knife from his pocket, and another of them put his hand on his waistband.

Between the gloom and the fact that I was standing half a block away, I couldn’t see well, but a dark shape stood out against his green t-shirt. Chances were it was a gun handle. 

I decided to move away from where I was and find a better vantage point to monitor their conversation, which seemed like a good compromise between my curiosity and my self preservation.

I slowly backed away from where I was, glancing over my shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, and then circled around the rear of the building I was lurking beside.

My investigation paid off. Halfway down the alley, I saw a fire escape that was leading up the back of the building that Lung and his gang were standing in front of. The boots of my costume had soft soles, so I was nearly silent as I ascended.

The roof was covered in gravel and cigarette butts, which made me think I wouldn’t be nearly so quiet walking over it. Instead, I walked on the raised outside lip of the roof.

As I neared the part of the roof directly above Lung and his gang of ‘Azn Bad Boys’, I crouched and crawled forward on my stomach. It was dark enough that I doubted they would see me if I jumped up and down and waved my arms, but there was no reason to be stupid.

Being at the top of a two story building when they were on the ground floor made it hard to hear them. Lung had a strong accent, as well, which meant I had to wait until he had spoken a few sentences before I could figure out what he was saying. It helped that his mooks were utterly, respectfully silent as he spoke.

Lung was snarling, “…the children, just shoot. Doesn’t matter your aim, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure. We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?”

There was a murmur of assent.

Someone else lit up a cigarette, and then leaned over to light a cigarette for the guy next to him. In those moments that his hand wasn’t cupped around the flame, I could see the gathered faces of just a dozen or so of the gangsters gathered around Lung.

In hands, waistbands and holsters, I could see the dark metal of guns reflecting the orange flame. If I had to hazard a guess, all of them had weapons.

They were going to kill kids?

Not if I killed him _first_.

 


End file.
